Were There Female Doctors in Ancient Greece?
Pretty much everyone has heard of Hippocrates — and if you haven’t, get out of that rock you’ve been living under for the past millennia! Hippocrates is often named “the father of medicine” because of his advanced medical knowledge in the 4th and 3rd century BC, and because of his lasting contributions to the field of medicine even today.
So Greece had doctors — clearly. Hippocrates is not the only example of a famous, male physician. But what about female physicians? Were there women who were allowed to study medicine, or were their rights limited by their time period?
I’m here to answer that very question.
To answer this, we can look at the story of Agnodice. Agnodice was a woman living around 400 BC, who was tied by laws in Athens that prohibited any women from practising medicine. However, she disguised herself as a man and trained under a talented physician, eventually becoming so good at her practise that other male doctors accused her of sleeping with her female patients. To disprove this, she disrobed herself and revealed that she was female. When she was accused of practising medicine as a woman illegally, her female patients came to her defence.
Her story was so inspiring, that Athens changed their law — after Agnodice, women were now allowed to practise medicine.
So the answer’s pretty cut and dry, right? Agnodice was the first female doctor, and set the law to allow others to follow in her path. Except there’s one massive flaw in Agnodice’s story:
Agnodice wasn’t real.
At least, we don’t think so. This is because, despite the claims of her being the first female physician, there is evidence of lots of female physicians way before her!
Literary and epigraphic evidence shows tons of women practising medicine, whether they be midwifes or doctors. The reason we know about Agnodice is from a Roman writer called Hyginus, but if Hyginus claims there were no “obstetrices” before her, how come there is evidence to demonstrate the opposite?
There’s also many reasons why her story is probably fake tied to her supposed mentor, timing of her life, her convenient name, and much more that is too detailed for me to explain in this article. But what you need to understand is this: Agnodice claims she is the first female doctor, but we know for a fact there were female doctors before her.
Some examples include people like Metrodora, who wrote the oldest medical text by a woman. Another female physician was Aspasia who defied the “women get no education” laws in Athens (and pretty much everywhere else), and ended up specialising in gynaecology and obstetrics. Salpe was a midwife said to work alongside Pliny the Elder, and Lais was known for arguing with many other famous physicians.
But hold on — did I just say “women weren’t allowed educations”? If so, how could women become doctors — people who, generally, need a lot of education!
Well, there is an answer to this. First off, many of these supposed women were probably those who were lucky, who possibly had powerful enough parents to be able to give their daughters educations. Another reason is that Ancient Greeks believed religion and health were mixed — many diseases were supposedly caused by unhappy gods, or evil spirits. And women had a large role in religion, both public and domestic, which could imply they were linked to medicine. A final suggestion to this would be that, perhaps, women weren’t necessarily physicians — but instead midwifes, and then some. This is because women, being vagina-owners, would know more about childbirth than men, though there is evidence to suggest men took care of the “difficult” births.
In conclusion, were there female doctors in Ancient Greece? Almost definitely — texts casually mention female healers and midwifes, implying they weren’t rare and quite common. There are also plenty of examples of well known physicians in the BCs, as well as Agnodice being such a historical (and probably fictional) figure.
And if women weren’t doctors, they were at least certainly midwifes.